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The Tragic Story of the Arkansas Negro Boys’ Industrial School
Growing up, I thought the institution was an urban legend. The truth was worse.
History is fascinating. It is a work in progress. It evolves. Many times, the history we think we know is but a fable. But every so often, long-hidden history, not to be ignored, reaches out from the depths of obscurity, extending a hand from the distant past to tap us on the shoulder.
This is the story of one of those times.
My three brothers and I spent part of our childhood years in Little Rock, Arkansas. It was the 1960s. My memories of that time are clear, like living in a one-story, three-bedroom house on Marshall Street in a mostly Black neighborhood filled with children.
Our parents both held full-time jobs, so we spent a good deal of time left to our own devices. We played four-square and hide-and-seek for hours on end. We played baseball and touch football in the middle of Marshall Street without worry. It was a time devoid of video games, free of social media.
Except for Mrs. Pearl, the rotund, elderly White lady who paid me five dollars a week to mow her dangerously sloped yard, my childhood neighborhood was as segregated as my elementary school.
During my time on Marshall Street, the number of boys in the neighborhood became fewer, decreasing one by one. At the time, I assumed some moved away, as we did years later. However, there were times when I wondered if the boys in my neighborhood met a more sinister fate.
Once, I recall seeing on the local news that a boy my age was a suspect in a neighborhood grocery store robbery. Days later, police captured the young suspect, hiding between the mattresses in his bedroom.
News crews broadcast the scene of police escorting a disheveled young Black kid to their vehicle. To my horror, it was Bobby P., a boy I’d played with for days on end in the hot Arkansas summers, who’d eaten at our dinner table, a boy I considered a friend. After that news story, I never saw Bobby again.
Unlike Bobby, who was a bit of a bully and had a propensity for getting into trouble, my three brothers and I were what one might call “good boys.” We rarely…
